2011-A year in review/2012-A year to come

Hello one, hello all.
Apologies for not posting in quite a while, no real excuse really, more soon, promise...or something.
Anyways as 2011 draws to a close I thought it's be appropriate to look back at the year that was 2011 and a small insight into the year that will be 2012. Hope you enjoy!

2011

Ubuntu 11.04

I became a Linux user towards the end of April 2011, 5 days short of the Ubuntu 11.04 release if I remember correctly so as you can imagine I was pretty stoked to see the new Ubuntu in all it's glory. The day came, I didn't get it because I was in Wales, but then came the few days after...the day...yes. When I finally did get the upgrade, I was disappointed (to say the least) about this brand spanking new, all singing, all dancing or something interface Shuttleworth called "Unity". Don't get me wrong, I wasn't weeping to death over it like some of the Gnome vets you'd see out there. It's grown on me though but a turd is a turd no matter how attached you become to that turd, there ya go if someone wants to give me a billion quid for coining the world's worst phrase, you can, everybody wins! Except maybe Mark seeing as he fucked a lot of us over when he decided to abandon Gnome for the most part 6 months later.

Mortal Kombat 9

It was 19th April 2011 when we were graced with the ninth instalment of the 19-year old Mortal Kombat franchise. This game was observed as a homage to the 1993 game, Mortal Kombat II as shown from the redesigned levels from Mortal Kombat II, the inclusion of all Mortal Kombat II characters and the Mortal Kombat II style story tower. As well as these new features have been added which I hope we see in later instalments of Mortal Kombat, failing that, other fighting games. If you're a fan of fighting games with a particular liking to watching bones break, this is the perfect game for you, go buy it, NOW!

XVIII

Just to point out this is the review of MY year so bitching about missing games or events is pointless unless I've played them/these events have affected me. So anyway I turned 18 this year yayyyy! (for our funny foreign friends, in the United Kingdom 18 is the adulthood age, the age of alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc. I believe it's different in other parts of the world for example the drinking age in the United States is 21) anyway, thought I'd share that with you :)

Driver: San Francisco

This is a game I had been anticipating since July-ish, only got to play it in mid-December, gotta say, very mixed opinion boiling down to a pathetic aspect of my view on gaming: If it's a GTA-style driving game, it must have an Open-world aspect. I am the kind of person who will completely shun a game of this genre if I cannot leave my vehicle and there is no open-world bit, hence why I don't like things like this, I can see myself liking games like Carmageddon though, that looks cool.

(K)Ubuntu 11.10

As I mentioned before I'm a Ubuntu user but had a stint with Kubuntu in October and parts of November due to the 11.10 upgrade breaking my distro so I thought "Ah what the fuck, might as well". So I installed Kubuntu when I reinstalled and really enjoyed it...for about 2 weeks or so, the novelty wore off and the entire interface became a massive eyesore, so I went back to Ubuntu, well Unity at least. I haven't been using Ubuntu as of late sadly, mostly because Wubi has been giving me hell as of late (in that it constantly crashes and is thus barely usable). I may be using Ubuntu on my laptop when I go down to university though (leaving /root to handle the procrastination side of my university work).

11.22.63

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas 48 years, 1 month and 8 days ago today, ending his short term of just 2 years as president of the United States. The novel shown to the left is about an English teacher going back in time to prevent the assassination and so far (I'm only 3 chapters in, why I'm talking about it now I do not know) it is somewhat based around the butterfly effect of time travel (seeing as there's 2 versions of this theory). The butterfly effect is the theory that if you went back in time and did so much as kill a butterfly you could change the world completely and thus they've been discussing how different US history would be had the JFK assassination never happened, seems really interesting so far, coming from a guy who usually only reads the metro on the train, I'll let you decide if I'm well read enough to provide an opinion or not. Anyway great read, I suggest if you're a fan of King and/or time travel, read it, you'll thank me. I was also gonna talk about The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington, but then again I was a pillock and left it on the train.


So that is 2011 summed up for me, it has been an overall decent year to say the least, now let's see what next year has in store so far.

2012


Skullgirls

Skullgirls is a game due for release in early 2012 for XBLA and PSN, it follows the style of Marvel vs Capcom 3 in that you can have 3 characters in your team and the characters are...cats...riight, another thing to add for those of you who watch Sanity Not Included, Ms. Fortune is voiced by the same person who voiced Amanda in Sanity. I'm really excited to get my paws on this game and hope you will join me in playing (my PSN tag: UnspokenEchoes).






Cast 2012 tour

For those of you who have bought a BBC DVD from around 2003 you may have seen an advert for all the DVDs that had been released from that year, the song they used in these adverts was Fine Time from a Liverpudlian band, Cast. So these blokes announced in November/December that they were going on tour in early-mid 2012, and I am going to see them, along with Tesni, at Liverpool University, on 31st March 2012. Fancy going to see them? The dates are in this article.



New OMD album

As well as a new Cast album we should be expecting a new album from another Liverpool (well...Wirral) based band, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, I don't really know much about this album seeing as they only started recording this month, hopefully more about that as it comes.





The year of TheOpenSourceGamer

Yes I am determined to make this year my year, I'm am going to start getting serious with my videomaking, I am going to script my videos, gonna get my hands on a copy of Fraps, I am going to edit my videos, the works. If my youtube career is new and fancy to you head over here, ta. See you there!






So there you go, 2011 is drawing to a close, I hope you've all had a brilliant year, I'll be back on the first Wednesday of the new year (4th January 2012) for the new year edition of the Flash Game of the Week, see you soon.
TheWardy signing off for the last time in 2011.

An open letter to the YouTube community.

As most of you know I am starting to get re-involved with YouTube with my new gaming channel TheOpenSourceGamer and I've been part of the community before that dating back to around 2006-2007 so in a sense I am kind of a veteran in a sense but thats beside the point. As the YouTube community has grown I have seen people come and people go, I have also seen the community get a lot dumber as time has gone on, therefore I leave all who are involved an open letter expressing my feelings on the current state of the comments sections that remain open. So to all whom it concerns:

• The dislike bar: The like/dislike bar is a good way for users to voice their opinions on videos and for YouTubers to get an insight into how users like their videos, this number of likes and dislikes are both visible directly underneath the video player, neither need to be referenced in the comment section, no it is not a glitch, yes the video should have a dislike bar, wanna know why? Because different people have different opinions and neither YouTube nor Google will not let a video succumb to bias because you are too ignorant to see that.

• Opinions: Maybe you've heard the word before? Everyone has them, everyone is entitled to their own and to express them where appropriate and should be respected, so when someone says they don't like this, this and that about a video you accept the fact that they don't like it and leave them be, you do not lay into them or call them stupid/retarded you leave them alone because slamming them will NOT change their views.

• Irrelevance: This is mainly aimed at people randomly drop names of artists they don't like, what is the point? NEXT!

• Partners: OK I am not a part of the partnership program, therefore I don't know the ins and outs of said program but I do know a few things, it is not free money and it is not much, believe it or not most partners probably still have day jobs and if not it is probably due to secondary, tertiary etc. incomes because at the highest most average partners will earn ~$100pcm (this is all based on assumptions and whatnot, got evidence that proves otherwise? Please show, thanks) moving on.

• You don't like it?: THEN JUST SAY! Jesus Christ! The bitch fits people throw when someone does something they don't like, people hoping that YouTubers lose everything, hoping companies go bankrupt, all these bad things because people are doing things they don't like, there is no need for all this hatred, less of it.

• Loyalty: There are moments when you realize loyal fans, are quite the inverse. I'll provide you with two examples from two, fairly popular shows. My first example is fairly old now but there is a show on Machinima's network known as Sanity Not Included which was created by two men known as Dex and Lyle, each with their own personal channel, but I'll get back to those later, while waiting for the season 2 finale people have been bugging them, as you can expect, they're impatient to see this spectacular conclusion to the series, it's expected, what isn't really that acceptable is accusing them of being lazy and, worse still, attacking their personal vids, all because you want them to rush an episode?! There is no need. My next example is very new and even more annoying, there is a channel I am subscribed to called HappyConsoleGamer, recently he visited the Penny Arcade eXpo, or PAX for short, anyway he went down there and recorded a fair bit of footage in HD, few people were doing that there, unfortunately while he was there, though he didn't notice until he looked back at the footage, his camera started skipping frames and it turned out that it was giving out, now he made an appeal video saying he needed $1000 to get his camera repaired and reminding people that they were not obligated to give him any money if they didn't want to, despite this, people seemed disgusted, as if he didn't devote his time making videos to entertain them and whatnot, as if he was just randomly asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars in handouts where in reality they had to pay an alarmingly small amount of money, assuming that he has 34, 600 subscribers (which he almost has) each of those subscribers would have to pay $0.03, that is less than a fucking cent people! $1000 is not a lot to ask seeing how much time he has put into entertaining you ignorant children! Next point.

• Daily dislike: This is not really infuriating as it is stupid, you see this for people most people don't generally like, Justin Bieber, Rebbecca Black, Cher Lloyd, Lady Gaga, Nicky Minaj etc. either going onto their videos or using bots to go there soley to dislike the videos, in terms of general success rules, the likes/dislikes are near enough useless statistics and in a partnership situation does not affect income in any way, shape or form and in fact by visiting that video every day you are making them money just so you can alter one meaningless statistic. Good job.

• Thumbs up: I can sort of see why people would want people to thumb their comments up but even then, if you wanna be in the spotlight get a camera, screen cap software, capture card etc. and fucking work! Chip in, be a part of the community!

• Pointless comments: I don't care what year you are watching this video, how old you are, where you should hear about these people or anything like that, no one does, unless you can provide real and direct relevance to the video or people involved.

• Attitude towards YouTubers: OK I don't know where people get ideas about YouTubers, especially those on the partnership program, that their lives revolve around their channels, that if they make all these videos they have no lives, they get money and fame for doing nothing etc. If you scratch the surface of one of the top 100 channels you will find normal, sometimes working class people with 9-5 jobs, friends, family, girlfriends/boyfriends/fiancées/wives/husbands whatever, they are normal, down to earth people who probably make no more than your average college/university graduate.

Anyway I'm going to halt it there, I could go on forever but those are the best bits of my growing anger for idiots on YouTube, feel free to tell me I've made terrible arguments, I'm a hypocrite, I'm taking it too seriously but these are my views and I am sticking to it.

Anyway in other news I am calling it quits on the QuakeCon recap due to the fact that its been almost a month and most, if not all of you will have seen it all by now so I'll be just stating the obvious every time.

Anyway that's it for now, I'll be back with another post on Wednesday.

Bye for noww.
TheWardy signing off.

I'm back bitches!

Yes after 19 days of 0 activity (along with 21 of 0 pageviews) I am back. I don't really know what else to say now except I've had a decent holiday in in Bordeaux, France which consisted of drinking, staying in and more drinking, very social me. Also had a amazing time in Disneyland Paris which gave me a chance to act like a child again, few gripes here and there, not having that much money, being dragged onto rides, oh and that "princess" from the princess and the frog being in the once upon a dream parade, I mean COME ON! Why is she even being referred to as a true Disney princess, it's like classing Selena as one for fucks sake! Anyway, unrelated babble...Before I go I'd just like to notify you of a new project that I will be working on into 2012, only saying one thing at present, it involves computers and retro games, another teaser at the start of October ;)

Anyway I shall be back on track by next week with my horrifically late Quakecon recap on Wednesday as well as a lets play of Monkey Island 2 part 1 maybe? We'll see.
Bye for noww!
TheWardy signing off.

Early leave

Hey guys, owing to the stress and panic I've been suffering due to the riots which are rapidly spreading across the United Kingdom I have decided to call an early hiatus, I will return to regular blogging at the start of September as planned.

See you soon.
TheWardy signing off.

Internet and hangovers

In short, my reasons for not posting are:

Wednesday & Thursday-Rather bad internet problems.
Friday-At a party downing lager, whiskey and rum.
Saturday-Throwing the aforementioned drinks up and suffering from my first hangover.

For these reasons I have put everything off to next week, my deepest apologies.

I shall be back on wednesday, until then.

TheWardy signing off.

Pushed back

Hey guys.
I regret to inform you that the review has been pushed back to next Saturday, sorry, included in my apology is a double review/feature all in one post so stay tuned.

In other bad news as of Saturday 13th August 2011 I will be taking time off due to leaving boring old England for sunny France and won't resume posting until the start of September 2011...so yeah. Should anyone need to get in touch with me I'll still have my shit pile of a netbook (as opposed to my glorious Pentium PC) so if anyone wants/needs to get in touch with me through google, twitter, anything you can and I will respond ASA :)

Anyway that's all for now.
Next time we shall meet is Wednesday for Flash Game of the Week.
TheWardy signing off.

Flash Game of the Week: Dude and Zombies

AGH sorry everyone probably no-one, didn't realise how late it was, I'm gonna press on with this and try make it short and sweet OK?

Today Yesterday I bring should have brought you Dude and Zombies which was made by the wonderful men and/or women at FunCrow.
The main aim of the game is to repair your ride while fighting off hoards of zombies we've all been there we know what it's like. As well as the car's permanent repair status there is also a sort of temporary repair meter which degrades as the vehicle is attacked and will stop you from permanent repairs until the meter is brought all the way up. The game features both a shop selling various weapons, a health boost (which is upgradeable through the skills menu) and mines and a skills menu which has 3 three-tier skills which cover health, reload time experience and so on.

This is another one of those games that can last you for hours and, unfortunately, isn't really intended for those 5 minute time spaces due to the time consuming nature of the game, nevertheless this is an excellent game and if you don't play it well .you may as well be the devil himself, I'm jus' sayin'.

As always the link to the game on Kongregate
And there doesn't appear to be a second site for the game, all the "More Games" links appear to link back to Kongregate.

Anyway that's it until Friday, but may end up being Saturday if nothing of my interest surfaces between now and then...
See you later (:
TheWardy signing off.